About the site Christmas Baking with SusieJ

Your hostess

My name is SusieJ, and I'm a
home cook with a full-time programming job and
full-time obsession with Christmas -- my term paper for Confirmation class twenty years ago was
on the history of Christmas traditions. I live outside Philadelphia and bake in a circa 1972
kitchen in a 1901 house. The only professional-grade appliance is the
dishwasher, currently broken. Tentative plans are to renovate this December, expanding
the cabinet and counter space and replacing the dishwasher. And yes, for someone
as obsessed with Christmas as I, this makes no sense.

The interest in Christmas, baking and Germany started in the early 1900s.
My grandparents came from the Stuttgart area of
Germany in the 1920s. Like most immigrants,
they were self-sufficient; Granma gardened, canned, cooked and baked all of
her life and did all well. She and her cousins in America made both the
regional specialties of Stuttgart -- Springerle, plum cake -- and the new
American cuisine -- like lemon chiffon pie and Jewish apple cake. Their
daughter, my mother, learned to speak German before English. The foodie movement
of the 1970s influenced her cooking; we often had fondue, Chinese take out or
some new vegetarian dish (but let's not talk about the pork chops with cheese).

We've kept in touch with family in Germany. In 1989 I worked for six months
in Stuttgart while living with my godfather and his family. That winter I learned many things:
German, Unix, C, driving a manual transmission, raquetball, and baking the German way.
My Christmas and baking obsessions became full blown on return, abetted by a copy of
Mimi Sheraton's encyclopedic Christmas cookbook, Visions of Sugarplums and
a German book, Backideen, with a chapter on Christmas breads and cookies.

This site started in November 1996 as part of my homepage with a few
recipes from Mom and Granma, because a web site should be more than cat
pictures and links to friends. That was back when the web was starting to
get big; Wired went live a few weeks
after me. In 1999, I registered www.christmas-baking.com. However,
Christmas Baking with SusieJ is still that labor of love and obsession.
There is no advertising one the site; no one pays me to tell you that
Ghiradelli is the best brand of chocolate to be found in the
supermarket. Even the book recommendations don't garner affilliate fees.
It's just me, at home, deciding between typing in the notes of the
last recipe baked and cleaning the kitchen. Web site maintenance
seems to win out most times.

The totally
self-indulgent site from whence sprang www.christmas-baking.com
is still up and maintained regularly.

Recipes

The family knows that any recipe I get will eventually wind up on this site.
The first recpies posted were from my grandmother's notebook of recipes, most
from her friends and extended family. First I sat at the table in her apartment,
copying recipes onto small scraps of paper and post-it notes. A few, like the
Springerle recipe, she had written out with explicit directions. Others were little
more than a list of ingredients.

My grandmother's repertoire was not large -- although I still can't find her
macaroon recipe -- and within a few years I was reading her German cookbooks
from between the World Wars and translating recipes for the modern kitchen.
From German into English, and finding measurements, ingredients and techniques
that work. As different as modern German ingredients and techniques are from
American (vanille sugar vs. extract, weight vs. volume), so are the old recipes
from today. Most German recipes call for baking powder, no longer Hartshorn or
pottasche.

Some recipes have been adapted my more modern (1950s, 1960s) German cookbooks.
Most books have variations on the same recipe, and three or four different
batches will be made before a workable recipe is synthesized from the differing
sources. These books have a
strong south German influence, either from the Stuttgart or Munich areas.
German cuisine varies widely between regions, and undiscovered vistas of
cake and cookie opened up when we were joined by an exchange student from
Magdeburg, very much in the center of today's Germany, but in what had been
East Germany (kids, ask your parents). He brought with him his family's
favorite recipes. They are still very German, but very different from the
southern recipes. More citron and orangat -- candied peel -- are used, and
the cookies are spicier. The old south German recipes, for the most part,
featured one flavor, such as anise, fruit jelly or vanilla. This is my impression,
off the top of my head. Scores of recipes for spicy cookies with a south German
origin may be hiding from me.

Technical Credits

HTML: After starting with Laura
Lemay's book, Teach Yourself
HTML 3.2 in 14 Days, HTML wizardry was quickly in my grasp.
However, being lazy and faced with the task of creating many pages, I
tested a number of WYSIWYG HTML editors. My favorite is Claris
Home Page. For most recipes, I now use the CGI.
For the redesign, I reverted back to hand-coding the HTML.

CGI: Much of the grunt work of CGI scripting for
this site was originally done by Steve Grimm's Un-CGI
program. Then I learned perl, and of course, use CGI.pm.

Images: The first pictures for the site were taken
with an Apple QuickTake. We'e since upgraded to an Olympus. In 2003, we hosted
Tobi, a German exchange student with a great photographic eye. He happily
voluteered to play food stylist, and in one winter doubled the number of
photographs on the site. Photos are edited with Adobe Photo Deluxe (nice
program), iPhoto (great for organization, not for editing), Adobe Photo Elements
(the successor to Photo Deluxe with a better interface) and Gimp (powerful,
lousy interface -- anyone want to buy me Photoshop?).

Many thanks go to the webmaster and system administrator of the
server.

Testers

Christmas cookies for everyone who critiqued my pages:

Sarah Friedman

Chip Buchholtz

Linda Evans

Scott Harker

Donna Starner

Stephen E. Tyson

Matt Wengraitis

Thank you!

Fame and fortune!

Mentions in the media

LowHug
blog. Well, not linked by name really, but as a friend of the
publisher. Hey, I needed a new link!

Cleveland Plain Dealer, Rescue
Your Party (no longer on line)

She's
actual size (no longer on line)

Privacy Policy

For those who worry about these things:

E-mail addresses: If you share a recipe or a baking
disaster story, the submission forms ask for your e-mail address. The
Share a Recipe form lets you not show your e-mail address when the
recipe goes on line. What do I do with those e-mail addresses? Send a
nice thank-you note. Ask a question. There will be no spam. Considering
how long it takes me to answer my e-mail, do you really think I have the
time to spam? I don't share your address with anyone else, although I do
save all "fan mail."

Server logs: Like every other web server out there,
our server tracks and logs the files you download and your IP address.
If you are using IE 5+, it also tracks each time you bookmark a page. I
scan the logs weekly to see the most requested recipes and check for any
broken links. I don't really care about the machines that download the
pages, unless it's an unusual domain, such as Bulgaria or Singapore. We
don't do visitor tracking, although we might check what generates all
those 404 errors

Link Exchange Policy

This is my standard answer for any link exchange requests:

Thank you for offering to link to Christmas Baking with SusieJ,
www.christmas-baking.com. Every year, I try to find to sites I think will
be interesting to Christmas Baking visitors. I'll be sure to check out
your site.

Copyright

Recipes and pictures from this site have appeared in some interesting
places over the years: web pages that directly linked to pictures (running
up my bandwidth) without credit, websites and discussion boards that just
copy the pages, and New Jersey newspapers that copied recipes
(but at least mentioned the site). It was a bit annoying. Some clarification
seems in order.

Don't claim anything on this site as your own, including copying recipes,
essays, stories, pictures, etc. and republishing them, including web pages,
books and newspapers.

Don't directly link to images. Don't copy the images and use them for
yourself. That's claiming something on the site as your own.

If you want to use something on the site for professional purposes or to
republish, say, in a newspaper, another web page or even on a discussion board,
contact me first.